


Out of the Dead Zone

by Miss_M



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Antagonism, Crew as Family, First Time, Life-Affirming Sex, M/M, Sexual Content, Spaceships, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:55:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Capa’d rubbed him the wrong way from day one, no, from minute one of their acquaintance.For some reason, Mace thought of this on the third morning he woke up in the oxygen garden.
Relationships: Robert Capa/Mace
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Out of the Dead Zone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PR Zed (przed)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Capa’d rubbed him the wrong way from day one, no, from minute one of their acquaintance.

“So what’s your real name?” Capa’d said with a friendly smile, like a guy setting a trap might lay on Mace.

“What?”

Capa’d glanced around at the others, all clustered together in the simulator’s common area. Nerves? Or lines being drawn, alliances sketched out? “Are we supposed to address you by your Navy call sign?”

“My name’s Mace, James Mace, as was my father’s name and his father’s before him. I expect you to remember it. It’s only four letters, just like yours.” The bite in his voice had been deliberate, and Capa’d eyed him before sitting back and raising his hands in temporary surrender.

For some reason, Mace thought of this on the third morning he woke up in the oxygen garden, water from a fern dripping slowly on his face, pooling in the hollow of his cheekbone and sliding down into his ear. His mouth felt dry from sleeping on his back, yet his shorts and skin were damp from the high humidity in the garden. The _Icarus_ announced the start of alpha shift, while all around Mace, his crewmates shifted on the floor, rustled the plants nearest them, groaned. They all lay side by side, in a row along the garden’s main walkway, jackets folded under heads as pillows. Head to feet to head to feet, to spare anyone who could still feel awkward after eighteen months in close quarters.

“I think I’m starting to grow gills,” Trey muttered, down by Mace’s bare feet.

“You know what’s funny?” Cassie said. She raised her hand and fingered the carrot fronds swaying above her face in the breeze from the fans. “I can’t even swim that well.”

Harvey propped himself up on his elbow so he could see Cassie over the yawning Corazon. “What do you mean?” he asked Cassie. “How did you get into the program if you can’t swim?”

Cassie pinked. “Well, I _can_ swim. I can dive fine, that was the requirement, up and down in the pool. It’s just all that flailing…” She made ragged breaststroke motions in the humid air, shrugged. “I prefer a good run.”

In his spot at the end of the line of sleepers, over by the door, Capa chuckled. “You can go first when the capsule hits the water and Mission Control orders us to fish out bricks from the bottom of the Pacific.”

Cassie rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

On second thought, Mace knew exactly why he’d thought back to his first meeting with Capa – with all of them, but it was Capa who stood out, a mental hangnail on which Mace’s memories always snagged. Capa kept quiet a lot, and when he did say things, everyone deferred to him, because he was the physicist, because he’d designed the payload, because he was… him.

“Hey Capa, can you explain to us again how come we all have to sleep here, packed in like sardines, for the foreseeable?” Mace said over the sounds of bodies shuffling, coughing, low conversations.

Trey nudged him, Trey’s elbow to the back of Mace’s knee, and Searle started to say his name in that level tone which drove Mace slightly bonkers.

Mace kept talking: “What was it you used to say: a big bang on a small scale, not much to see at first. Except there was a lot to see, wasn’t there, and four minutes nowhere near enough time for us to get to a safe distance to see it. And so now, our solar harvest is down 40%, we bled enough O2 in the solar burst to have to shut down most of the habitat module, our big piece of luck is that the burst didn’t blow a hole in our shield, and I’m having to sleep with the smell of Trey’s athlete’s foot in my nostrils every night. _Man_ ,” he surged up and grabbed Trey’s wrist, startling Trey and himself at how Trey’s pulse leaped at the contact. “You nudge me again, I’ll take your arm and I’ll…”

“Mace.” That was Kaneda.

Kaneda never shouted. Kaneda was on his feet, over by the trellises holding up the peas and beans, the heavy globular tomatoes. Kaneda looked at Mace. Mace looked away and let go of Trey’s wrist.

“Our big piece of luck is that we had a safe journey out and successfully delivered the payload,” Kaneda said.

“More than that,” Corazon added. “We still have the garden. We have water and power. We haven’t been blown off course.” She looked around at the people sitting and standing and lying in her garden. “We’re all here.”

“And in six to eight weeks, we’ll be out of the dead zone.” Cassie smiled at Mace, ever the peacekeeper. “There might be a message waiting from your family.”

Sitting on the floor, leaning back on his hands, a fern frond brushing his scalp, was not a good position in which to look down or really anywhere but at the faces surrounding him: tense faces, understanding faces, tired faces. Exhausted faces still not awake to their own success in delivering the payload.

“Yeah,” Mace said. He swept his gaze around the garden, meeting everyone’s eyes for a moment. Capa’s eyes, he saved for last.

“Enforced proximity can be as wearing on the psyche as lack of human contact,” Searle said. The sunburns on his face and hands had stopped peeling – now he just looked raw and shiny, like a mollusk minus its shell. “Which reminds me: I would like to start debriefing you all,” a discordant chorus of groans didn’t stop his spiel, “now that our mission objective has been fulfilled. We’ve all had to become accustomed to the possibility of catastrophic failure or death. And now…”

Mace wondered if Searle was aware that with his arms sweeping away from his torso, all ten fingers spread, he looked like a child miming the sun’s rays radiating out into space.

“ _Possibilities_ ,” Searle intoned, his eyebrows raised high as he considered his crewmates.

For a long moment, there was no human sound on the _Icarus II_ : only the hum of fans, the drip-drip of water, the rustle of leaves.

“Shit,” Capa said at last, and everyone shifted on their feet or laughed a little.

Mace had to give it to him – Capa did have a way with words, when he chose to speak.

To preserve oxygen and power and keep the garden alive, they’d sealed off most of the habitat module, leaving only the garden and the toilets fully supplied with air and power. To access the kitchen, the flight deck, and the corridors connecting them, they’d let some air into the area, turn the heating and ventilation on at low volume, then one or two crewmembers would pile on warm clothes, move fast and take hits from oxygen bottles strapped to their backs, grab what was needed, check what needed checking – data from external sensors, computer feed, navigation readouts – and haul ass back to the garden, which served as their temporary base of operations, mess hall, and dormitory. Sleeping quarters, the Earth room, the observation room, and the social area remained strictly off limits, dark and cold and airless. One part of the ship a tomb, the other bursting with life.

The worst part was that there was nothing much they could do to repair the damage the solar burst had caused to the hardware on the _Icarus_ ’ hull. They just had to sit idly while the plants and the remaining solar panels and the recycling units did their thing.

Having to spend every waking and sleeping moment together in the dripping, humming, chlorophyll-scented closeness of the garden kept them all on edge. It was a different kind of edge from the one they’d occupied since they’d been selected for the _Icarus II_ mission, and even before then, when they were growing up and coming of age on a steadily cooling world, amid the famines, the migrations, the wars over fertile land not covered by thickening permafrost or rights to flowing water with low saline and alkaline content.

Now their job was done, the world got a second chance to save itself or fuck itself up, nothing that the _Icarus II_ crew could affect anymore. After accomplishment came the void, the anticlimax, so when Searle talked about possibilities, they all had to decide what it was they wanted, what they’d aspire to now. No mission objective to direct them, no common purpose beyond their shared past. Confined to only part of a ship tens of millions of miles from Earth, what they wanted and aspired to was modest by default, but people could get very passionate about small things once the big thing was safely behind them.

“I think we should reopen the Earth room,” Searle argued. “Even for just five, ten minutes per person. It will give everyone a much-needed break from the garden. No offense, Cory.”

“None taken,” she replied. “I’d love nothing better than to have you all out from underfoot for a few hours. Someone trampled one of my squashes when they went to use the toilet last night.”

No one fessed up. Corazon shook her head.

“Never mind the Earth room. If we could all spend just one night in our own beds,” Trey said, looking rapt. “I think it would be really good for us.”

Mace added his two cents: “Fuck the beds and the psych tricks, I want a shower. Just throw a bucket of water over me, I reek.” He swept a warning eye over the others. “We all reek. We’ve had ten days of living in the tropics with water only to drink.”

“Actually, it’s been two weeks since we delivered the payload,” Kaneda said.

“No,” Cassie whispered. “It can’t be that long.”

“Losing track of the passage of time,” Searle told Kaneda, almost too softly to sound pointed.

Putting aside the disturbing thought that he’d lost track again, Mace jumped at the chance. “Any second now, we’ll start eating each other, right? Come on, Captain. A round of quick showers, give us something to look forward to, make us feel human.”

“He’s right,” Capa said.

Mace rounded on him on instinct – he didn’t need Capa’s support or his approval! – but Capa’s calm gaze stopped the angry remark from coming out of Mace’s mouth.

Mace didn’t congratulate himself on getting his way – he knew all the reasons why his idea made for the most rational use of their depleted resources and gave the biggest psych boost in exchange. Anyway, he didn’t have time to give himself mental high-fives. He’d only get a thirty-second burst of water out of the showerhead, and he intended to make use of every droplet and every millisecond.

Bracing himself as for a blow when he heard the pipe clang, Mace gasped when the liquid warmth burst over him. A thrill up his spine, his pores opening, the sensation washed over him, overwhelming. Searle occasionally remarked on the dangers of touch-starvation and prolonged sensory deprivation, but he’d never said anything about needing to feel warm water on one’s skin. Mace scrubbed himself almost violently, astonished at his own body – the contours of his torso, the coarse hair on his legs and arms – gasping and blinking in the warm downpour, rivulets running down his back, between his buttocks, and on down his legs. He got hard in an eye blink, though he hadn’t even been thinking about sex. He hadn’t thought much about sex in months.

The water shut off with a mean little gurgle. Mace still had soap suds on his hands. He used the slick to get himself off – it only took a couple of hard strokes, his dick already twitching when he fisted it. He wasn’t thinking about anyone or anything beyond clean skin, soft hair, a mouth, warm breath on his lips, and he didn’t lie to himself that his perception of time was still messed up. That had been the shortest wank since he was a kid, and Mace didn’t have it in him to care. Resting his other arm against the cubicle wall, he pressed his eyes to the inside of his elbow and exhaled loudly through his mouth. He let his softening cock slip out of his hand before he reached for his towel and sloshed the puddles on the floor around with his foot, to get the excess water and his spunk down the drain. He felt mellow for the first time in longer than he cared to remember, but he didn’t want to keep the next person in line for the shower waiting.

Exchanging his sweat-stained clothes for clean ones – the soiled shirt and sweats went onto the big communal pile they’d launder when their resources permitted it – Mace put on his beanie and his vest and his gloves, strapped on an oxygen bottle, and went to check the mainframe. Kaneda insisted he take Trey with him, in case one of them felt faint from the low oxygen. For once, Mace didn’t feel like arguing.

When they got back, stripped off the extra layers, and opened the door to the oxygen garden, a wall of smell hit them. Not the expected, already-customary chlorophyll, moist earth, oxygen-rich air, but cooked food, the oxygen garden’s air full of spices. And the heightened sounds of people gathered around a meal, glad to be in each other’s company.

Mace fell back a step, feeling faint, like the smell had cut him off at the knees. So he was starved for both showers and the smells and sounds associated with the company of other people, go figure.

“You okay, man?” Trey asked him. Mace grunted and strode into the garden.

The six people sitting cross-legged on the floor around a large, steaming wok on a heating pad looked up, smiled, waved Mace and Trey over.

“Surprise!” Cassie said.

“What’s this?” Trey accepted a bowl and a pair of chopsticks from Searle.

“Tofu, carrot, broccoli, and squash stir-fry in a peanut sauce,” Corazon recited. “We were all getting tired of the raw vegetables and nutripaste. _Icarus_ says we should regain full use of the kitchen in about two weeks.”

Mace raised an eyebrow. “Squash?”

Corazon shrugged. “It was Capa’s idea. Waste of a squash otherwise.”

She gestured at the empty spot between her and Harvey, but Mace took his bowl and went around the circle. Nudging Searle with his knee, Mace squeezed in between the psychiatrist and Capa, who gave him a quick look before returning to his food.

“Guilty conscience?” Mace said quietly, under the sounds of munching, chatter, laughter. They were a community again, if only for the length of their return journey.

Capa looked Mace in the eye, his face revealing nothing.

“You always sleep nearest to the door. The squash bed is right there too,” Mace continued. “Anyone picking their way over sleepers to go piss would be awake enough to give the squashes a miss by the time they reached the door. But not someone who was right by the door and figured they could be less careful.”

Capa nodded thoughtfully, chewing, weighing Mace’s words. “Inference is not evidence.”

“Works for Sherlock Holmes, pal.”

Capa gave a tiny smile at that, and Mace dug into the stir-fry. The first bite flooded his mouth with saliva, the flavors and textures so intense, Mace had to close his eyes and take a deep breath to steady himself before he could resume eating. He noticed Capa notice this, but Capa said nothing and so neither did Mace.

Their exit from the dead zone was heralded as they’d all hoped but rarely dared speculate out loud: with obvious relief, Harvey announced that the _Icarus_ ’ comms array had picked up a package message from Moon Base. They were using the kitchen once a day by that point, showering every few days for minutes at a time, still sleeping cheek by jowl and head to foot in the oxygen garden but clinging to the promise of being able to return to their bunks soon.

Kaneda flooded the comm center with oxygen and light and heat for an hour so that all eight could watch their messages from home at the same time, on the main screen, on the palm-sized portable screens they used to communicate during major repairs or emergencies, even on Capa’s extra special processor with earphones plugged in so it served as a piece of regular A/V hardware for a little while.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mace could see Corazon smiling through tears before her little screen on Mace’s left, while on his right, Harvey kissed his fingertips and pressed them to his screen, so Mace knew without turning his head that the message was from Harvey’s wife.

Mace’s old man acted stoic, what his sister Joy called their father’s brigadier general persona, but Mace could tell that James Mace II was upset and hurt that Mace hadn’t sent one last message before entering the dead zone. Joy didn’t bother with hurt when she could call Mace a dickhead and a moron in her message before telling him she loved him and he’d better come back in one piece, making Mace smile even as he squeezed his right hand into a fist at the thrum of his own remembered anger when Capa had made him miss his chance. He only listened to his messages once, then stepped out of the comm center, leaving the others glued to their screens, and went to the coolant tank. Kaneda would ream him out for not taking a buddy with him, but he needed to get out of there and use his hands for something useful, or he might have punched a wall. Or a face.

He’d been at the mainframe for less than half an hour when Harvey pinged him to get back to the comm center. Sweat prickled on Mace’s upper lip as he pushed the scooter to go faster than it was designed to do. Even taking hits from his oxygen bottle, his breaths were short as he zipped past the garden and the observation room – its huge window now showing only black without even a distant white and blue dot in the center, not even if one squinted real hard, and right now no one spent time there, not even Searle – then stepped off the scooter, pulled off his hat and oxygen mask, and clocked the light still spilling from the comm center and the knot of people in the corridor outside. 

Corazon caught sight of him first: “There he is!”

“Where did you go?” Harvey’s question sounded like an accusation. “We’ve all been waiting for you.”

“What is it?” Mace strode closer, bracing for bad news, disaster.

“We’re recording messages to send back. It’s your turn first,” Cassie told him.

“Why didn’t someone else go first?”

“Capa wouldn’t let us. Said you had to be the first after… you know.”

Mace took them all in: Harvey, Trey, Corazon, Cassie, Searle. No Captain, no Capa.

“They’re finalizing the report about the payload delivery,” Searle explained off his look. “Go on, Mace. You get to be the first to tell your people back home we did it.”

Shit. For a guy who was supposed to keep them all even-keeled, Searle had a real knack for knocking the breath out of one with just words, not even a punch to the gut.

Mace needed nearly a full hour before he got what he wanted to say right, to his father, to his sister, to his buddies from before he’d been selected for the _Icarus_ program. And still his words sounded hollow when he hit playback, so he hit send instead and let the next person take their place before the recorder. Capa and Kaneda weren’t back yet, and Mace was on kitchen duty that week. He’d taken so long in the comm cubicle, he had to get started with dinner, then there were eight people’s dishes to scrape off and wipe down – they still did the washing-up every couple of days – and Kaneda dropped a bombshell in the middle of dinner by announcing this would be their last week sleeping in the oxygen garden. Corazon’s calculations put their oxygen reserves at 80% and climbing, which meant they could reopen the sleeping quarters for the rest of the journey home. Giddy as kids at the prospect of their own beds, in their own sleeping cubbies, the crew spent most of the night tossing and turning, jostling each other under the swaying ferns, whispering to each other and occasionally bursting into loud peals of laughter.

Mace lay on his back between Trey and Harvey, his hands folded under his head, looking up at the bulkhead, the inky black of space visible through a viewport above the overgrown trellises. He thought about his family, and how odd it would be to see them again and be the same person they remembered yet not be able to really explain to them what the _Icarus II_ mission had been like. He thought about the people next to him, the men and women with whom he’d saved the world, and how they might never see each other again once they were back Earth-side, and even if they did, what would they have to talk about? Swap old mission stories, stripped of their shipboard context, whatever had given those events meaning on a human rather than a cosmic scale fading? Fill each other in on their lives after the mission? Mace couldn’t begin to imagine it. He’d left a dying world and expected he might die on this mission, had accepted it, and now the prospect of getting together with his crewmates for drinks dirt-side seemed about as likely as dropping dead the second their landing capsule broke Earth atmo.

On the first night back in their sleeping quarters, Mace told himself he’d fall asleep if he just lay still and closed his eyes, but then he remembered that that hadn’t worked even when he’d been a kid. He got up and padded barefoot down the short corridor lined with cubbies, four on each side. He heard muffled laughter, moaning, the soft smack of flesh on flesh from one cubby, couldn’t remember at first whose cubby that was.

There were rules, and they’d all followed them. Even when they’d all gone a little stir-crazy on the voyage out, the mission had remained at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Even after they’d delivered the payload and had to sleep squashed together in the oxygen garden for weeks, Mace had noticed no nighttime fumbling or furtive jerking off, but having the burden of the mission lifted and a bit of privacy could be a real boost to the ol’ system. Searle had warned them that the delayed emotional high of their shared accomplishment would make them more prone to risky behaviors, chasing that dopamine rush, all the more so since they were all somewhat desensitized by the limited stimuli _Icarus_ had to offer. Just yesterday, Harvey had burnt his hand on a welding laser while repairing a comm panel, a moment of careless disregard for procedure, buoyed by a sense of invincibility.

Mace certainly felt buoyed by _something_ as he left the sleeping quarters, traversed the social area and the kitchen, and entered the command part of the ship.

Capa was where he expected to find him, in the Earth room, but instead of a standard module playing, Capa stood in the middle of a holographic simulation, the _Icarus_ narrating from the speakers in stereophonic sound: “… reverse probability vectors show a 92% probability of the established outcome. The payload detonation caused a temporary increase in the sun’s surface activity, which subsided and segued into the slower chain reaction that was the bomb’s desired result.”

The mission was a success, the final report on the payload delivery signed, sealed, and sent ahead to Earth, but sometimes one just had to keep worrying at a sore spot.

Leaning against the doorjamb, Mace spoke up, startling Capa: “ _Icarus_ , can you extrapolate alternative outcomes? Like how much extra time we would have needed to reach a safe distance and avoid any external damage from the solar burst?”

The ship ran calculations, while Mace held Capa’s gaze. The computer recited: “With the established parameters in place, the lag time from payload separation to detonation should have been seven minutes to avoid any external damage to the ship’s integrity.”

“ _Icarus_ ,” Capa said, still watching Mace, “how much additional fuel would we need for a seven-minute hard burn instead of a four-minute burn?”

Another moment ticked by. “Too many variables. Additional fuel would require additional storage tank capacity. This would alter the ship’s dimensions and mass, which would affect speed, transit time, energy needed for payload delivery and reverse burn, as well as the crew’s provisions and life support requirements. Remaining projection is not open to useful speculation.”

Mace scoffed. “You trying to teach an engineer about tech specs?”

Capa may have pulled a face, but it could have been the flicker of the hologram across his features. “Just making a general point.”

Mace pushed away from the doorjamb, loped into the hologram, close to Capa. “Good bomb.”

Not just the flicker of colored light this time: he’d unbalanced Capa with that remark. Then Capa’s face turned softer as he looked around at the hologram, the yellow of the sun, the blue-green of the payload slipping into it. “Yeah. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Tell the truth: did you think it would?”

“Honestly? I had no way of knowing. With theoretical physics, once you start trying to apply the theory, you either stop at the limit of what’s known or you keep running ahead on hope.” Capa’s expression turned wry. “It probably helps to be raised religious, even if you replace god with megaparticles.”

When Mace was growing up, his family’s god had been duty and service to the United Nations Navy. He’d always accepted that dying doing something necessary and right was a good way to go, maybe the only way to go. And now? Well, fuck it, he thought. Everything seemed scaled down. What was the worst that could happen?

Quick as a punch, Mace closed the distance between them and kissed Capa, his hand going to Capa’s long hair, Capa rumbling softly in his throat when Mace’s grip in his hair tightened and pulled his head back. Capa opened his mouth, so Mace licked into it. They were pressed against each other, Capa’s hands landing hesitantly on Mace’s waist, and Mace was sure he was trembling from top to toe: his skin, his lips, everything. He pressed Capa close, his free hand on Capa’s spine, right where it seemed to dip above the ass, and broke the kiss before he lost it completely. Mace bent his head to graze his teeth over the top of Capa’s shoulder – asshole loved his sleeveless shirts, his skin pale and freckled even under the shifting colors of the hologram.

Capa twitched but didn’t try to push him off. “I’m getting the impression you’ve been saving this up for a while.”

“ _Icarus_ , we don’t need the hologram anymore,” Mace said, running his nose, his lips over Capa’s shoulder and up his neck. The skin, the smell, the warmth – Mace felt like he’d fly to pieces. “Override protocol 1-2-7-9: turn off the audio and video feeds from the Earth room till I tell you to turn them back on.”

“Okay, Mace,” the computer replied, and the colors of the simulated universe vanished, leaving them in a small, bare room with white plastmass walls and floor, lit only by the instrument panel by the door and the floor lights in the corridor.

With a real effort of will, Mace took a step back, so he could see Capa’s face tipped up to his. He saw his own heavy breathing reflected in the heave of Capa’s chest and shoulders, the sweating heat radiating out of him in the flush on Capa’s face. Capa was hard, so at least Mace wasn’t the only one reliving his teenage years.

Mace hadn’t quite figured out how to ask without sounding like a real dickhead, but Capa spared him the trouble by stepping in, taking Mace’s face between his hands, yanking his head down, and kissing him, Capa’s finger pads pressing hard against the skin and bone behind Mace’s ears. Mace returned the kiss with a kind of furious hunger, and was already tugging on the drawstring at his waist and wrestling Capa to the floor.

Capa was shorter, slighter, and Mace seized the advantage to press Capa back with his full bodyweight, straddle Capa, and get both their dicks in his hand. Capa’s breath caught. He looked up at the bulkhead, he tipped his head way back, like he was reading the door panel upside down, before he returned to Mace, grabbed Mace’s arms with his hands, and watched him. Mace moved over Capa, panting and humping his hand, feeling the strength in his grip, the slide of Capa’s want against his own, their precome slicking his hand, viscous between his fingers, so that Capa slipped out of his hand once.

Mace cursed and got them both in hand again, and Capa half-smiled and watched him steadily, jerking his hips up to match Mace’s rhythm as much as he could with Mace’s weight pinning his thighs to the floor. Mace could feel the tension in Capa’s thigh muscles, Capa pressing his heels to the smooth floor. Capa’s eyes flickering on Mace’s face, on Mace’s hand jacking them both, Capa’s face starting to turn tight.

Mace thought that they all had been so focused on the mission for so long, he can’t have been the only one so pathetically desperate for this. He thought about that first meeting, Capa’s expression when he’d noticed Mace’s anger, Capa’s smile, first sharp, then placating, Capa’s silences on the ship, a self-contained universe within a bubble of life within the vastness of interplanetary vacuum. Mace thought about the ship itself, the life support systems pumping rich oxygen into this room, in and out of Mace’s lungs as his body moved, the solar harvest providing the warmth which caused beads of sweat to stand out on Capa’s lean torso, the recycling filters taking all of their filth and waste and giving them back something clean and needful.

Capa’s grip on Mace’s biceps turned painful. Capa’s head rolled back, his gaze slipping from Mace’s face, Capa exhaling like a sprinter when he started to come, a shudder running up his spine and making his heels drum on the floor, Mace’s hand directing spurts of Capa’s spunk over Capa’s stomach and chest in long, strong strokes. Mace’s balls tightened from the feel of Capa coming in his hand, Capa shooting his load while rubbing against Mace. He had to stop moving and make himself let go of his and Capa’s cocks, or he wouldn’t have been able to keep himself from coming by reviewing the ship’s specs and how those provided the necessary environment for them to fuck in.

He rolled off of Capa and sat on the floor by Capa’s head. He took himself in hand again, just a light pressure, and propped himself up on his free hand so he could tilt his body toward Capa, who looked over at him and, with amusement tugging at his lips, picked up what Mace was putting down. Clever bastard that he was.

Capa rolled toward Mace and wrapped his hand around Mace’s cock. Mace let go of himself, wanting to feel Capa stroke him, up and down the length of him. Capa didn’t think to pause at the head and give it a squeeze, or maybe he didn’t care to waste time, for Capa’s mouth was on Mace at once. You fucker, Mace thought, blowing air out through his nose as Capa’s lips slid over the wet head, tongued the slit. A momentary snag of teeth, then Mace watched and felt as Capa sucked in his cheeks, his hand pulling toward his mouth, his cheekbones standing out even more than usual.

Capa’s hand was smooth and sure on Mace’s shaft, jacking him fast and faster. Precome and drool dripped from Capa’s mouth and down Mace’s dick, giving Capa’s hand even more slick, and Capa’s wet, sloppy sucking filled Mace’s ears, his head, his whole body. Capa’s eyes were closed, and Mace wanted to tell him to look at him, Mace, but he didn’t want to distract Capa even for a second. He could have sworn Capa had every part of his body in his mouth at the same time: his ass sticking to the floor, his back muscles bunching with the effort of trying to fuck Capa’s mouth in this position, his throat feeling rough as he gasped and grunted through it. His skin vibrated with how good this felt.

Mace grabbed Capa’s hair again and pushed his head down, Capa gagging but still sucking, his hand catching the rhythm of Mace’s hips, up to Capa’s wet, stretched, beautiful goddamn mouth, and down with the downward motion of Mace’s body. Mace tugged on Capa’s hair, the softness of it, the tensile strength in it, the weight of Capa’s head as Mace yanked it up then pressed Capa back down, Mace’s pelvis and his hand working together, and Capa jerking him hard – Mace could feel the tension in Capa’s hand and arm, his tendons and muscles straining to get Mace off – humming around Mace on the exhale and continuing to suck. Mace humped harder, pressed Capa down and held him there. Capa choked, kept his fist tight around Mace’s shaft, Capa’s throat constricting around the head of Mace’s dick. Mace’s lungs were burning with how close he was. Hard burn, he thought, like a real dickhead, and half-laughed.

He hadn’t seen the sun reignite because they’d lost all the sensors on the back end of the ship, and in his head there was no starburst of white, obliterating light. Rolling wave after wave of sensation crashed over him, his nerve endings all quivering together as he shot his load, pumping his hips. Capa swallowed around him, still jacking him, still drooling, come spilling out of his mouth, still giving Mace everything he had while Mace gripped Capa’s hair at the roots and fucked and fucked his mouth till he was wrung out and couldn’t hold himself upright anymore and let himself collapse back onto the cool, smooth plastmass floor, his sweaty skin sticking to it.

“Fuck. Goddammit,” he said, his chest heaving, his heart hammering. He could _not_ sack out where he was. He looked over at Capa, who was laid out on the floor next to Mace. Capa’s eyes were closed, and he worked his jaw from side to side.

“Well?” Mace barked.

He wasn’t even sure what he was asking: did Capa have any feedback he cared to share after the fact, had Capa enjoyed it ( _well, duh_ , as Joy liked to say)? Had it lived up to what might have been going through Capa’s head in all the years the two of them had spent staring at each other during so many standoffs across conference room tables and space charts and meals on board the ship? Had it lived up to the kind of fuck one deserved after saving the world and maybe having gone without since before they left Earth?

Capa – who had started to get hard again just from blowing him, Mace didn’t fail to notice – sat up to give him a calm, assessing look. That was the thing about Capa, Mace could never stare him down or make him back off. Even while choking on Mace’s dick, Capa had held his own.

“Need more data,” Capa said and kissed Mace. Not just an after-fuck peck: he kissed with his teeth, his mouth slick with Mace, and climbed on top of Mace, both of them slippery with sweat and spunk, Capa’s half-hard cock dragging on Mace’s stomach.

Distantly, Mace wondered if they’d have to discuss this with Searle, and whether Harvey or Kaneda would give them more hell for the reg violation and for creating a gap in _Icarus_ ’ files, and what there was in the kitchen they could use to clean up after themselves. All this ran through his head at once, none of it lingered. Mace locked his arm around Capa’s waist, squeezed his scrawny ass, and ground their bodies together, feeling himself stir again too. He tilted his head to get Capa to kiss him deeper, and Capa understood and obliged.

At the start of the next alpha shift, while they were all eating tofu and powdered egg scramble and drinking synth coffee around the table in the social area – Capa sitting away from Mace, both of them concentrating on their food and the general conversation, because while they could get it up like teenagers, they weren’t actual kids for fuck’s sake! – Harvey came in, looking even more nervous than usual, and played them a recording.

“Listening to your space music again?” Mace goaded him.

“I was scanning the frequencies,” Harvey said with less dignity than he thought he projected, while the steady pulse on the recording echoed around the habitat module: a brief swell of sound, quickly tapering out, then repeated, again and again across all that empty space outside their hull.

“What is it?” Mace asked, resolutely unimpressed.

“That’s the _Icarus I_ ,” Harvey said. “That signal is their distress beacon.”

A tremor ran around the dining table, humans not unlike starlings in how they responded as a group.

“Jesus,” Cassie breathed. Beside her, Capa leaned across the table, as though to hear better, his shoulders tense as he listened to the recording still playing on the speakers.

Trey speculated that after seven years, it was impossible that anyone on their predecessor ship remained alive. Harvey argued with him, till Kaneda cut through the consternation to point out two facts: a distress beacon could keep running long after everyone on board was dead ( _that_ sent a chill up Mace’s and, by the looks of it, everyone’s spines), and the _Icarus II_ had only enough fuel to get them back to Moon Base. Even if they could just about afford a short delay for an emergency on their own ship, even if the slingshot around Mercury had put them within audio range of the _Icarus I_ , it had also set them on a course for Earth from which they absolutely could not deviate.

“He’s right,” Mace said.

“But…” Cassie bit her lip.

“We’re going to pass right by them,” Corazon finished for her, neither supplicating nor arguing, just stating a fact.

“Within ten or fifteen thousand miles,” Kaneda acknowledged. “But we have no way of knowing what the conditions on that ship are, and after we achieved our mission objective, my duty as captain is to get this ship and you all safely home. We will scan the _Icarus I_ with our sensors on the flyby, make a visual recording to go with Harvey’s signal. Earth will decide what to do.”

“It will be too late for a rescue mission,” Trey said, watching the projection of their ship’s course almost – _almost_ – crossing the location of the _Icarus I_. “Even if they’re still alive now…”

“If the United Nations Government decides to send a rescue ship, one could probably leave Earth before we return,” Kaneda cut him off, calm, unmovable. “And we know, as they knew as well, that we are all expendable.”

Some of the crew looked resigned, others unhappy. Mace wasn’t exactly jumping for joy but he still agreed with Kaneda. Theirs was not a rescue mission, and anyone who went into space knew that there were no guarantees of safe return. Hell, they’d left behind an Earth shorn of any positive guarantees – what they would return to had to be better by default. Surely that made up for the sacrifice and, now, the abandonment of the _Icarus I_. The hard knot in Mace’s stomach didn’t entirely loosen.

People started to drift away, whispering among themselves or grimly silent, stopping only to put their breakfast dishes in the washer. Capa abandoned his cup and plate on the table and drifted over to the screen showing the projection of the two ships passing each other in the nothingness.

Mace joined him. “Kaneda’s right,” he said, for Capa’s sake as well as his own. “You know he’s right.”

“I’m thinking about the bomb on board the _Icarus I_. We’ve mined all Earth’s fissile materials for these two bombs. If we could send a ship to them, another ship, and get that bomb back, it could keep the Earth’s power grids juiced for a couple of centuries. We’ll need all the help we can get while the sun powers back up.”

“And who better to be on the crew of the _Icarus III_ than the guy who made the first two iterations possible?” How to get inside someone’s head without making it sound like a challenge? Mace didn’t have that knack.

Capa glanced at him. “What about you? You telling me once we’re back dirt-side, you’re gonna kick back, put your boot heels on the porch fence, watch the world go by? Let being a hero be your full-time job?”

“Hey Capa, remember what I told you when we first met?” Mace said. “About names, specifically yours and mine?”

“Four letters? Yeah, right back at you.”

Mace nodded, looking Capa in the eye, clapped Capa on the shoulder, and let his hand rest there a moment before they’d need to take up their respective duties for the day.

A life after the mission, this was not – but it was something, and more than enough for the time being.


End file.
